DRUGGING PEOPLE ISN'T FUNNY TO ME

Assuming they have the correct perps in custody for the Tainted
Muffins Case -- or even if they don't -- it's not hard to reconstruct
the strategic planning that the criminal masterminds behind this
caper likely undertook:

"Dude, you know what would be awesome? If we got the teachers
stoned!"

"That would be so awesome!"

"It would be cool and awesome! Dude, we could bake some, like,
muffins. ... They wouldn't even know they were getting stoned! That
would be so awesomely hilarious! It would be twisted!"

"Muffins! Awesome!"

"It would be so amazing! We would be, like, legends! And those
teachers would be so stoned!"

"They'll be, like, 'Hey, look at me, what's the matter with me? I
can't stop laughing and I have, like, the munchies! I'm, like, a
pothead!' And they won't even know how they got high!"

"Dude, that is so amazingly awesome!"

And so on.

OK, what strikes you about this conversation, apart from the fact
that it sounds like a passage of dialogue from Porky's?

Just this: That it's irritating, juvenile, imbecilic, unoriginal and
not funny.

Honest, I don't think I'm a humorless shrew, but the hilarity of this
episode is entirely lost on me.

People keep telling me, some with a faint sense of embarrassment,
that once it was established that what the staff members at Lake
Highlands High School had ingested was a relatively harmless amount
of marijuana extract, they thought the whole "muffin man" episode
was kind of amusing.

"That's pretty funny," said one out-of-town friend to whom I
recounted the magic-muffin story. "Hilarious," said another.

Another common theme is that it's funny -- in a ridiculous sense -- that
this case fell under the purview of the FBI North Texas Joint Terrorism
Task Force:

"Muffins as a weapon of mass destruction?" said one colleague.
"C'mon, that's funny."

"I just don't think this rises to the level of a felony," said
another, referring to the charges filed Wednesday against Joseph
Robert Tellini and Ian McConnell Walker, both 18.

Both men currently face third-degree felony charges; prosecutors say
they'll try to have the charges upgraded to second-degree felonies
carrying a maximum of 20 years in the slammer.

I cannot claim to be a charter member of the just-say-no club. I
don't think our society would run off the rails if possession and use
of small amounts of marijuana were decriminalized.

And if, indeed, federal agents were distracted from genuine cases of
terrorism going on right here in Dallas while they combed the
countryside for the muffin suspects (I find this doubtful) -- OK, you
could call that overkill.

But I suspect that for the targets of this unfunny joke, this was not
a pleasant and unexpected workday buzz. These people were scared.

Let us rewind the tape to the day that 19 school employees fell
abruptly sick -- some of them were dizzy and nauseated -- and did not
know the cause. For a few hours, at least, they didn't know whether
they had been poisoned.

It took doctors and cops at least that long to rule out such
frightening agents as E coli, ricin, salmonella and listeria.

These victims may have been relieved to find out what was wrong with
them, but they probably weren't very amused -- and that includes the
sweet 86-year-old receptionist who spent the night in the hospital
because, among other things, she couldn't stop laughing.

It's as if a person started yelling on a crowded airplane that he had
a bomb in his briefcase. If it turned out, in the end, that he had
not a bomb but a bar of soap, his fellow passengers would still be
unlikely to bark with laughter and slap their knees and chortle,
"Hey, that's a good one on us!"

The fools who did this strike me as the type who think it's the
height of comedy to get your dog drunk and watch him stagger around.
Not only is it not funny, but it borders on cruelty.

Getting people drunk or high without their knowledge or consent is a
staple movie comedy gag.

In real life, it's just stupid.